I started blogging with Blogger.com too before converting to WordPress recently. I have numerous search engine optimized Blogger templates and I decided to give them away.

If you are a Blogger user and interested to optimize your blog for search engine. Go get my SEO Blogger Template. It’s free. There’s even a tutorial to show new Blogger users to convert to Classic Templates so that you can use my SEO Blogger template.

Here’s how the template look in 3 different skins – mrgreen, mrblue and mrcrimson:

The review was made after upgrading FreeDirectorySubmission.blogspot.com to Blogger Beta. There are new features that I really like. And there are things that I longer can do with the new Blogger Beta platform.

Overall, I think it is a good thing because with the new platform, I can blog quicker and I also like the Denim layout – until I learn how to tweak the XML to enhance it! I believe the information can be found at Blogger Help on Page Elements Tags for Layouts but I haven’t got the time to study this help page yet.

Actually, even if you use the new layout as it is, they are already SEO friendly. I like the Denim layout and have done some small customization on the HTML template which you can easily save(Download Full Template) to your computer harddisk with a single click. That’s another new feature that I like since I have the tendency to tweak the HTML codes very frequently.

So I am not going to upgrade this blog to Blogger Beta – it will be migrated to WordPress when I find the time to learn all the commands and tags needed to do the required customization.

Also, WordPress is more powerful. There are many plugins available to extend the functionalities. I could also save some time whenever I tweak the template because there is no need to regenerate all the pages and upload to my server again and again.

However, the move is not easy. I have been losing sleep for the past 2 nights trying to customize WordPress theme or template for TIMMGuru.com. I want to use the existing design and layout. And it was not easy to convert the template. The WordPress theme is far more complicated than Blogger’s template. I have to search the documentation and learn the right commands and tags. I find the Conditional Tags necessary to customize the sidebar. As you can see, the display of this sidebar is different on the main page, individual post page and archive page. So I’ll need to do some progaming logic to control what appears on which page.

The basic type of pages for WordPress are the

• Main Index Page (MainPage in Blogger.com)
• Single Page (ItemPage in Blogger.com)
• Category Page
• Archive Page
• Search Page
• and others

You can control what to appear in each of these pages! Now, flexibility comes with complexity!

You’ll see that I’ve rounded the corners – no more sharp corner and a step closer to Web 2.0 design!

These are some of the changes:

• Main column on the right and sidebar on the left
• Monthly archive on main page
• Comment on individual post page
• Added rel=”nofollow” to some of the external links

However, the most important factor in this design is to make the the main page, the individual post pages and the archive pages as SEO friendly as possible. I can probably showcase this design as an example of SEO Web Design.

In fact, this new design and layout is to prepare for a port of this blog to WordPress. So far, I have published more than 120 posts. It can be painfully slow to re-publish the entire blogsite when I update the blogger template.

It will be another 2 weeks before I have the time to start playing with WordPress and customise the template. I can see that it will take several sleepless nights to achieve the effect and result I desire!